According to the international energy agency (IEA)-world energy outlook report 2010, demand for energy in the world is expected to increase drastically in coming few decades. Whereas, sources and supply of conventional energy like electricity from utility companies is going to be limited. This may lead to a huge supply-demand gap in energy. Also, the energy needs to be efficiently used to reduce carbon footprint. One of the major challenges faced by large consumers of energy, for example, a distributed facility or a process plant is to reduce energy consumption without compromising on the quality of operating conditions and quality of services. Under these circumstances environmental sustainability has been drawing a greater attention.
A plethora of advanced technologies are being implemented in order to optimize the rate of consumption of energy. For example, in geographic locations where the climate varies significantly, energy consumption control in accordance with operating conditions becomes even more relevant.
Further, regulatory policies governing energy supply & consumption also vary from country-to-country and even within a single country. Furthermore, different organizations owning the distributed facilities or process plants set forth policies related to operating conditions and energy consumptions as desired by them. The maintenance of required operating conditions in the distributed facility or process plant becomes even more complicated and challenging, with consumers opting for a combination of multiple sources of conventional and unconventional energy supply in a dynamic way. Moreover, cost and quality of energy consumed from different sources may also be significantly different can further add to the complexity to maintenance of required operating conditions.
Moreover, in any system, optimization of energy consumption and related controls is greatly influenced by granularity of measurement and metering of consumption. Since granularity and extent of metering is limited by practical constraints like constituency of metered area as recognized by the energy supplier and cost benefit analysis of own metering in the distributed facility, accurate and granular of measurement of energy consumption at an individual device level remains a myth.
In a typical distributed facility (e.g., a multi-facility), there can be different classes/types of devices performing different functions. Some of these devices directly contribute to environment control and some indirectly. Devices belonging to a device group performing same or similar functions may further have different characteristics. However, typically facility management systems implement individual level control of devices or a group of devices for such purpose. This may make the process of environment control less effective and less efficient because of lack of traceable and lesser controllability, to maintain desired operating conditions.
Existing techniques do not provide an intelligent and comprehensive energy management solutions for optimization of energy consumption and control of such complex aggregation of diverse devices in multi customer multi time zone distributed facilities, such as process plants, office spaces, retail outlets and the like for achieving desired operating conditions within the given set of policies.